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New Book on Chilean Pentecostalism

Martin Lindhardt: Power in Powerlessness. A Study of Pentecostal Life Worlds in Urban Chile, Brill 2012.

This book breaks new ground in the study of Latin American and global Pentecostalism by exploring the ritual and everyday religious practices through which Pentecostal life worlds unfold. In addition to asking the familiar question of why many lower class Latin Americans convert to Pentecostalism, the author asks another question so far largely neglected in the scholarly literature: how, or through what processes, do people begin and continue to relate to themselves and the social world in a particular Pentecostal way? For members of the Evangelical Pentecostal Church in Valparaíso, Chile, life is pervaded by divine and satanic presence and intervention. Through its fine grained analysis of different ritual, discursive/narrative and reflective processes the book shows how church members integrate sacred others into their everyday lives ― or how they learn to live, think and behave as Pentecostals.

Readership: Scholars, students and others with an interest in Pentecostalism, Chile and Latin America and more generally in religious conversion, ritual practice and religious experiences, religion and gender as well as in Christianity and politics.

Martin Lindhardt, Ph.D (2004) in Anthropology,University of Aarhus, Denmark, is a part time lecturer of Health Sciences at the University of Copenhagen. He has published extensively on Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity in Chile and Tanzania and he is the editor of the volume Practising the Faith. The Ritual Life of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians. (Berghahn Books 2011)